


Something Reckless

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Red Hood/Arsenal (Comics), Titans (Comics)
Genre: M/M, Rating subject to change, This was supposed to be crack, but it became a character study, post RH/A fix it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-06-07 20:06:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15226893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: Roy doesn’t see any immediate threat, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. He carefully inches the door open, glancing up to the rooftops once more and then down to the mass currently trundling its way to its hands and knees while the balcony creaks under the motion.“You know,” he says absently, when nobody takes an immediate shot at him and nothing catches fire, “when they warned me about birds flying into my windows, this isn’t quite what I had in mind.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this was largely inspired by a throwaway line from Waylon in the issue of post-Rebirth RHatO where Jason, Artemis, and Bizarro team up with the Suicide Squad, when Jason asks after Roy and Waylon casts aspersions on the good of the Titans as a support network.
> 
> It was originally supposed to be a slightly goofy crack fic based on the prompt “I know it’s strange that I’m naked on your patio but if you give me some clothes or a blanket I’ll explain everything,” but, surprising no one, it turns out I have a lot of emotions about Roy Harper so I immediately turned it into an introspective character study-cum-post RH/A fix it. Worth noting: I have limited first hand experience with addiction, so many of Roy’s perspectives in this were built on conversations I’ve had with friends who are recovering addicts and their experiences.
> 
> I’m kind of just writing it as I feel like it, so there’ll be no set update schedule or anything, but considering that the next issue of RHatO is poised to kick all my feeligs into overdrive I’d imagine you can expect to see fairly regular progress.
> 
> In the meantime, enjoy some self indulgent JayRoy!

While spending a morning in the quiet solitude of his kitchen idly trawling the internet shouldn’t be especially strange, Roy Harper feels the unfamiliarity of it keenly.

He’s in the kind of civvies that suggest no intention of leaving the privacy of his apartment, unshowered and still faintly aching in places from the showdown against Troia a few days ago. It’s weird to be nursing his wounds - and a Diet Coke - without the background chatter of his friends, but it’s something of a relief, too. Keeping a civilian residence is a practical necessity for a number of reasons, not the least of which is occasionally indulging the human need for solitude.

Roy is a social animal, at his core, and he loves his team, but sometimes he needs a little space to clear his head. Especially after a couple of weeks like the ones they’ve had - recovering long lost memories of another life; Dick’s shitbag littlest brother royally fucking Wally over and showing zero remorse for doing it; the cosmic force that’s been steadily beating down the door to their universe finally successful in breaking through, nearly killing more than one of their teammates in the process.

Troia wasn’t Donna, not really. Roy knows that, but he’s been waking up in cold sweats every night since Donna put her future self down like the rabid animal she was, Troia’s sneer imprinted behind his eyelids and her words echoing in his head.

_“You loved your addiction more.”_

It’s not exactly surprising to hear. He thinks that’s the part that bothers him most.

He knows how close he’s come to meeting that particular end already, knows how close it lingers all the time.

Everybody likes to talk about how proud they are that he beat his addiction, like it’s been confined to history. Most of them don’t understand that addiction isn’t like that. It’s not a villain you get to lay out and toss into Arkham or Bell Reve to forget about. An addiction like Roy’s is a thing that haunts every second of your life, every corner of your existence from the moment it first appears, and it is always firmly rooted in the present tense.

I _am_ fighting it. I _am_ beating it. I _always_ will be unless, someday, I’m _losing_ again.

The verbiage is important. That’s the lesson Waylon spent the most time drilling into his booze soaked brain over the weeks after Roy’s clumsy attempts to goad him into murder.

It’s a constant struggle, a chronic illness that no amount of time or medicine or therapy ever cures whole-cloth, and it’s crucial to remember that. He appreciates his friends’ support, their concern, truly. Even so, it rankles at times, to not be able to explain to them that there will always be meetings, there will always be an itch under his skin, there will always be bad days, and worse ones, where he skims too close to the bottle for comfort, spends too long considering which seedy alley is likeliest to house vices he hasn’t actively courted in years.

They might understand, if he could bring himself to say anything of import about it. The closest he’s gotten since the Titans wandered back into their memories was during that whole debacle with the Furious Five, trying to impress upon everyone that while recovery is conceivably within the grasp of anyone who desires it, it’s also a long, difficult, ugly road to tread.

He thinks back to Dick’s hand on his shoulder, his easy, affectionate, immediate reassurance that Roy didn’t have to worry, that he’d bested his demons already.

Roy understands what Dick was trying to do. It’s the same reaction most people have when they see an addict on this side of hard-won sobriety. The practical reality of living with addiction is unsettling to look at, so most folks try to push past it and face toward the gilded parts - all the joy-limned auspices of success that come with breaking free of the bottle or the needle or he pill.

Don’t worry, you did it, you won, it’s over. So eager to to assuage any perceived negative that they don’t recognize that the ugly parts are the ones that matter most.

He knows that Dick didn’t mean anything by it, was just doing his best to be supportive, but that doesn’t stop Roy’s stomach from twisting a little when he thinks on it. Normally, he would try to be more gracious about it - Dick is hardly the first person to want to gloss over the difficult parts of recovery to remind Roy of the better ones - but with the possibility of a future like the one Troia laid out for him staring him in the face, he can’t quite manage.

He takes a quick, hard sip of his drink. Even though it’s just a Diet Coke he tosses the mouthful back like a shot, play-acting to soothe a little of that itch under his skin as he scrolls absently through a long list of search engine results.

There’s an abundance of AA meetings in the greater Manhattan area, and while any of them would probably work - especially considering that Roy has distinct memories of falling hard off that particular wagon in the imminent days before the Titans got their memories back - he’s holding out for a narcotics group.

He’s not entirely sure when he attended an NA meeting last, which means he’s way overdue. Not counting the couple of hazy counseling sessions he’d had with Lilith under the influence of memory magic - which Roy has been doing his best to pretend never happened - the closest he’s gotten to actively participating in his own recovery since way back when he was thrown into that shithole prison in Qurac are the few times he saw Waylon when he was tooling around Gotham with Jason.

He scrubs a hand over his face, huffing a bitter half-laugh into his palm. Jason. Now there’s a name he hasn’t thought of in awhile.

That’s something of a lie, if Roy is being honest - and not just because a significant portion of Roy’s time in previous months has been dedicated to defending against defamations of Jason’s character in light of the Red Hood’s recent polarizing shenanigans.

He thinks about Kory and Jason both, all the time. He can’t really help it. They were a huge part of his life for half a decade, and given Roy’s proclivity for personal attachment - a “stage three clinger,” Jason had called him on more than occasion - it would probably be worrisome if they didn’t cross his mind more often than not.

When it’s Kory who wanders into his brain, Roy will spend a few moments drifting gently in fond memories, maybe send an absent, affectionate text if the mood strikes. He gives Jason half a heartbeat to cross his consciousness before he shuts that train of thought down with extreme prejudice. He’s only willing to entertain it now because he’s feeling self-destructive, and if there’s one thing Roy has always been good at it’s knowing which of his wounds are the tenderest, which will give the best, hardest rush if he sinks his fingers into them, and Jason left a gash across his heart like Roy hasn’t nursed in years.

The more bitter parts of him, the neurotic parts that the drugs and alcohol have long since hooked into, have a lot to say about Jason. About why he left, and what kind of man Roy _really_ is, no matter what Jason’s previously voiced opinions on the topic may be.

It sticks bitter in his craw even now that Jason had begged off of what had arguably been the most important relationship in Roy’s life with an excuse as flimsy as not being able to live up to Roy’s apparently oh-so-exacting ethical standards. As if Roy was some big hero. As if they hadn’t all been fumbling through together, him and Jason and Kory, just wanting to be better than they were, to have somewhere they belonged and someone they belonged to.

Roy had loved them both, in a lot of varied, alarming, and frequently confusing ways. Even after Kory left, after Jason let Roy’s anxieties spin out just enough to allow Roy appreciate his own autonomy before calmly coming to collect him through a hail of gunfire and easy banter, Roy had been happy. _Really_ happy, with just the two of them and their warehouse and their, admittedly misguided, hero-for-hire jag.

If any of it had even been real.

It sits heavy in Roy’s chest, the dismal possibility that their friendship, the loyalty that’d driven Jason to return to the last place on Earth he should ever want to see just to save Roy’s stupid ass from a mistake of his own making, might just have been some trick of the universe’s fucked up timeline. Everything that had come after that was of their own doing, of course, but that’s something of a cold comfort a year after Jason walked out and left Roy defeated and alone.

He tries his best not to think about Duela. Not because he’s afraid of her, or even because he believes she’s more than tangentially responsible for the flaming wreckage of whatever nameless, amorphous relationship he and Jason had had, but because if he thinks about her too hard he understands more than he cares to about Jason’s motivations where she was concerned. About whatever fractured self-image drove Jason to take her in and, later, to turn his back and walk away.

Understanding breeds forgiveness, and Roy isn’t ready to let this grudge go yet.

He’d wondered, at first, why Duela hadn’t tried more obviously to drive a wedge between them, although she’d always been clear that of the two she was more interested in impressing Jason than Roy. It wasn’t until she had him strapped to a table with blood in his teeth and a few more puncture wounds than usual that he realized it had been a calculated decision on her part.

“I’m tearing out his heart,” she’d said, and Roy had nearly laughed.

It had seemed such egotistical folly at the time, to assume he meant so much to anyone, let alone Jason, who takes extreme measures to convey that whatever remained of his heart after the Joker blew it to pieces had melted away in the Lazarus pit. Roy can’t help the rush of bitter amusement that accompanies the memory on this side of the past, because it had seemed something like a miracle at the time.

That Jason - private, taciturn Jason, whose only hard currency is secrets - had not only admitted to his affection, but exposed that particular vulnerability to an audience of thousands. Even now it makes Roy’s heart shiver with awe, despite the wave of pain that roars in after it.

Because the first thing that Jason did immediately afterward was to brutally, publicly excise his admission in the same breath, ripping Roy’s heart out right along with it.

Roy shouldn’t have been surprised, probably. Jason has always shared more with the Bat than he cares to admit, and neither of them suffer that kind of visible weak spot for long. It was always just a matter of time before Jason left Roy out in the cold. Roy just hadn’t expected it to hurt so badly when he did.

He takes another swill of his soda, drumming his fingers against his kitchen counter and idly considering his schedule. According to the meeting list, there are a few places in Midtown he could swing by this afternoon - he’s not officially on Tower duty until the day after tomorrow but he knows his friends well enough by now to know that he ought to at least put in a social appearance before the roster demands his presence. In the wake of the kind of fight they just barely scraped through, if he goes to ground too hard they’ll get worried, and the last thing he needs right now is to be coddled by well-meaning superheroes.

Reluctantly, he thinks on Jason again.

For all his many and versatile faults, Jason had never handled Roy or his issues with kid gloves. He remembers a trek through the snowy Colorado wilderness, a pause outside of a neighborhood dive, Jason’s eyes clear and frozen blue as he said easily, “This isn’t mission critical, and I need you where you can be at your best.”

It had been similar to plenty of other casual, preemptive admonishments Roy had received from any number of fellow crime-fighters, nothing to write home about. What had been special was the way that Jason just rolled his eyes and smirked and took Roy completely at his word when he nudged Jason’s shoulder and assured, “Never better than when I’m by your side, Jaybird.”

He’s _still_ proud of himself for making it out of that hole with nothing but water on his breath.

A while after, Jason found Roy with a flute of champagne on his tray table during an intercontinental flight and had only asked quietly whether Roy was drinking again. He hadn’t ranted or railed or judged or assumed. When Roy had explained that it was a control exercise, that every once in awhile he liked to order a drink just to prove he could let it alone, Jason hadn’t made any indictments of the foolishness in such an action or looked at Roy with suspicion, just nodded and settled into his seat and passed the rest of the trip in amiable conversation.

Maybe it’s because he grew up around addicts, lost his mother to the same demon and knows intimately how treacherous it can be, but Jason is the only person aside from Waylon who has ever really seemed to understand what Roy struggles with, when he needs to be treated with extra care and when he needs everything to be normal, when he needs space and when he needs to be pushed into confrontation.

It’s that knowledge, that intimate understanding that makes the whole miserable business of Jason leaving Roy bloodied and battered in a dilapidated old Gotham factory building so much harder to stomach than it should be. After all, if someone who knew him, understood him the way Jason did couldn’t hack it in the end, what kind of time clock is running down the minutes on his current team? How long before he makes the first misstep that cracks their trust? What if he already has?

He tugs his cell phone out of his pocket, fiddles with the screen until he’s scrolling through his contact list. He lets his gaze catch on the simple entry that reads “J” for brief second, thumb hovering indecisively for a beat before he scrolls past.

He doesn’t know where Jason is now, what he’s doing, aside from gallivanting across the globe with a wayward Amazon and some kind of funhouse mirror Superman knock-off. And doesn’t _that_ sting on the days Roy lets it, when he can’t push past his wounded pride and simply be glad that Jason has somebody half-competent watching his back because, despite their fractious departure, Roy still believes down to his bones he’d do a better job. He doesn’t know if Jason would want to hear from him about anything, let alone something as silly as this, even if he was in a position to answer at all, so he sighs and scrolls a half-step further, instead, to the ‘Jonesy’ a few slots down.

It only takes a moment for the phone to ring through to voicemail, same way it has the six other times Roy’s called him in the last week and a half. Running around with the aptly named Suicide Squad doesn’t leave Waylon an abundance of time for personal business. The vigilante lifestyle rarely does, in Roy’s experience, and he can’t imagine a team leashed by Amanda Waller has an easier time of it. Still, he’s a little disappointed when Waylon’s recorded voice echoes down the line.

He sighs, pinches his nose as he gets beeped through a halfhearted instruction to leave his message after the tone, and says, “Hey Waylon, it’s me. Sorry to bother you, I know you’re busy, it’s just.” He pauses, considers how to best explain himself. “It’s been a rough coupla days.”

He snorts a little at that - understatement much? - shakes his head, and adds, “Fucking _time travel_ , you know? I’m so sick of villains from the future, man. We gotta get someone to put some kind of lock on the timestream or something. Frankly I could go the rest of my life without anyone telling me that I - telling me how I go.” He pauses. Swallows hard. “That it - it _gets_ me, in the end.”

There’s no need to qualify. Waylon will know what he means.

Roy is silent for a beat, stomach twisting grossly at the premonition he’s been trying so hard not to look at dead-on - the promise of an ignoble death with a needle in his arm and a bottle close at hand. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slow, waving a hand in the air as though he can physically brush the knowledge aside.

“I know, I know, the future isn’t set in stone, just because he was me doesn’t mean I have to be him, yadda yadda, time travel platitude bullshit.” He sighs and closes his eyes, takes another long breath and opens them again. “Anyway, uh, give me a call when you have a minute? Could use some sense talked into me right about now. Oh! And, uh, don’t worry, too much. I’m headed to a meeting this afternoon. Hope you’re doing okay. Talk to you soon, big guy.”

He doesn’t throw his phone down immediately after he hangs up, but only barely. He feels jittery, too many emotions rattling around inside him and all clamoring for attention at the same time. He’s always vaguely assumed this must be what drowning is like - struggling against some invisible, impossible force just long enough to snatch a pitiful respite, a tiny, agonizing moment of hope, before its momentum drags you under again. It’s a worryingly familiar feeling, and that more than anything is what’s got him so spooked, has him leaning on Waylon so much recently.

That’s what sponsors are for, and he knows that Waylon doesn’t mind, but Roy hasn’t felt this wrong-footed in years, recent magic-induced, head-first dives back into alcohol abuse notwithstanding. That’s another part of what’s got him in a twist, he knows.

All it took was one demonic monster scrambling his brain a bit and Roy was right back to spending nights thoroughly whiskey-pickled in the bed of his truck and starting fights with local law enforcement when he got rightfully pulled over for driving under the influence. Some hero.

He always takes great care to remember that it’s a thin line between recovery and backslide, but he’s had more viscerally upsetting reminders of that than usual in the past few months. He should probably look into therapy again, but it makes his stomach hurt to think about it.

About Hugo Strange - back when Roy was running with the Outlaws and even earlier, before shit broke bad with Ollie - poisoning his mind and severing his support systems, driving him to isolation and self-loathing and nearly to an early grave. Lilith, after that, who had been a wonderful counselor, it’s true, but who is too deeply entwined with Roy’s personal life on this side of memory lane for Roy to feel comfortable talking with her in a professional capacity.

He doesn’t know how to go from watching someone make cow-eyes at his most obnoxious friend to confiding in them about two days ago when he’d spent longer than he was proud of staring at the half-empty six-pack of craft IPAs that Wally keeps discreetly in the back of the fridge, considering; or how the weight of everything that’s happened over the last year is pressing down on him so hard that he’s halfway to quivering with the desire to trade it all for an empty, dizzy spin. Easier to unload those secrets on a roomful of strangers that he’ll probably never see again, and while there’s a lot to be said about the healing power in intimacy, this is one demon that anonymity will exorcise just as well.

The NA meeting isn’t until one, but Roy’s chest is tight with agitation, fingers jittering wildly against the countertop. He could just shoot the shit with someone for awhile, reach out to Dick, or maybe Kory. They’re good at distractions, when they’ve got the time. He could probably call Donna, if he wanted, offer her lunch or something, but they’re taking some time, figuring out where their heads are at, respectively, before they talk some things out, and he’s reluctant to push too hard.

He could just _try_ Jason.

The thought flits across the forefront of his brain before he can really grasp it, agitation dropping hot into the pit of his belly as soon as he parses its content. He pushes off from the kitchen counter, nearly knocking his laptop to the floor, and leans into his palms where they’re curled over the lip of the granite countertop until they sting.

He’s angry with himself for a lot of things right now - for tripping up and falling back into drinking even though he knows most of that blame lies with Mr. Twister; for mishandling things with Donna so badly; for fighting with Wally over something so small and foolish as romantic entanglements when the world was breaking open around them; for letting Troia’s dismal promises of his bleak future get under his skin. He doesn’t need the added portion of self-loathing that comes with the inability to get Jason off his mind.

Roy is something of a hothead in many ways, but this kind of personal rage is different. Ice-pick sharp and turned inward with surgical precision, made especially dangerous because the urge to drive that feeling out, to mask it under something easy and sweet and dizzying, is what had driven Roy off the path of righteousness to begin with all those many years ago. It puts him in a spot where the parts of himself he’s not proud of can get their hands on the tiller of his existence with a little careful maneuvering, feeding off his insecurities and anxieties and nudging him in directions he knows better than to go.

Pity that knowing what’s happening doesn’t always make it any easier to fight.

Roy straightens up, scrubs his hands over his face again, and stalks across the living room, toward the door leading to the office that he’s fashioned into a miniature workshop with a little pointed remodeling and application of top-of-the-line tech. Idle hands being what they are it’s probably best if he gives himself something to do, some problem for his brain to pick at and dismantle so that he can get a moment’s respite from doing the very same to himself.

Because his entire life is going to hell in a handbasket without his consent, fate or God or the universe at large elects to throw yet another obstacle into Roy’s path - somewhat literally. Roy has barely meandered past the coffee table when something big and heavy dive-bombs onto his balcony with a thunderous crash.

He spares a second to think that this seems strangely apropos even as he’s flinging himself over the back of the sectional sofa he’d jammed into the cramped living room for cover. Nothing explodes immediately, which is something of a blessing, though there are continual metallic rattling sounds from the direction of the balcony. Roy crawls on his elbows and knees over to the corner of the couch and peers cautiously around, sparing a moment to toss a prayer to whoever may be listening that if this is the day he goes down he at least gets to put up a fight first.

He zeroes in on the vaguely familiar shape huddled in the corner of his meager little wrought-iron patio, crumpled up next to an oversized planter that the previous tenants had left full of thriving herbs. It has now been reduced to a pile of chipped ceramic, dry dirt, and brittle plant husks through a combination of the intruder’s poorly aimed crash landing and Roy’s incredibly lacking prowess for gardening. He squints at the shape, and though it takes him a moment to understand what he’s seeing, once he does his eyebrows leap toward his hairline.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mutters furiously, pushing himself up, scanning the roofline of the neighboring buildings for hostiles as he picks his way toward the balcony door. “Of _fucking_ course.”

He doesn’t see any immediate threat, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. He carefully inches the door open, glancing up to the rooftops once more and then down to the mass currently trundling its way to its hands and knees while the balcony creaks under the motion.

“You know,” he says absently, when nobody takes an immediate shot at him and nothing catches fire, “when they warned me about birds flying into my windows, this isn’t quite what I had in mind.”

“Funny,” rasps Jason _fucking_ Todd, not bothering to raise his head while he makes a few woozy attempts toward vertical posture. He’s in a pair of ill-fitting suit pants and that’s about it, hair sweaty and matted, body splattered with bruises and blood. It’s not the worst Roy has ever seen him, but neither does it inspire a lot of confidence in Jason’s ability to get himself upright.

“C’mon, let’s get you inside,” Roy sighs, wrapping his hand around the least battered portion of Jason’s arm he can find and hauling the other man to his feet. Jason goes mostly willingly, but it’s enough of a struggle that Roy starts to worry for real, catching Jason with his other arm in a tight grip around Jason’s waist when the bigger man staggers dizzily and almost topples over again. The balcony is only so big, and if he goes down at the wrong angle he’s liable to slip over the side and pull Roy with him. It’s a miracle he landed on it all, if Roy is correct in his suspicions that Jason had jumped from the neighboring building.

Jason leans into the support, reaches up and pats a clumsy hand against Roy’s chest, the faded Star City Rockets logo therein.

“Long time, no see, Arse-face,” he greets with a hazy smile, and if the severely inhibited physical capabilities weren’t enough to alert Roy to the fact that something is really wrong here, his blown-out pupils, so big that Roy can hardly see any hint of blue irises around them, would have done the job.

Roy’s gut twists painfully at the casual salutation, but right now is absolutely not the time to indulge his wounded pride, so he just sighs, “Tell me about it bird-brain,” and hustles Jason toward the door.

It takes a little maneuvering to get him around the coffee table and settled comfortably in the L-shaped corner of the couch, but Jason goes easily and sinks into the cushions with a contented sigh. He tilts his head back compliantly when Roy lifts his chin, blinking slow and sleepy while Roy pushes his bangs up off his forehead with his other hand.

“You cut your hair,” he says, dazedly, and Roy sighs again.

“I did,” he agrees, not bothering with a petty comment about how he’d cut it more than a year ago, not that Jason was around to notice. He’ll save his ire for when Jason can actually appreciate it. Instead, he busies himself with tilting Jason’s face this way and that, watching as he tracks Roy’s motion a half-step behind where it should be. “What happened, Jay?”

Jason licks his lips - they’re dry, cracked and bitten, split to one side and Roy will need to clean that out before he lets Jason settle in - and says, “Cleanin’ up after Black Mask. Some’f his guys’re in town, not happy to see me. Got me w’thout my hood an’ tied me up. Took my gear. Clothes.”

That explains the poorly tailored pants and the gratuitous nudity, at least. Roy drags his thumb absently along Jason’s cheekbone, tugging at the skin around his eyes for a better peek.

“Any idea what they gave you?”

“Sedative,” Jason replies in a breathless exhale. “D’no which one, how much. Nun- new- nur’leptic maybe.”

“Right,” Roy sighs, shaking his head. “Neuroleptics, of course.” He scrubs his hands over his face again. This isn’t really what he’d had in mind to keep himself busy, but there’s nothing much to do about it now beyond retrieving the extensively well-stocked first aid kit from the master bath and dealing with the issue at hand. Even if said issue looks about a half a second from passing out asleep on Roy’s living room sofa, blood and contusions be damned.

He reaches up, curls his palm over Jason’s cheek and nudges his head a bit until Jason makes an absent, quizzical noise and opens his eyes to narrow, sleepy, black-blue slits.

“I need you to stay awake for me,” Roy says. “Just for a few minutes while I clean you up.”

Jason tries for what Roy assumes is a nod, but must decide halfway through that his head is too heavy to finish it out because he just lets it flop to the side, instead, resting on the cushioned sofa back.

“Kay,” he agrees, and Roy gives his shoulder a reassuring squeeze before beelining for the first aid kit. He glances back from the threshold of his bedroom and Jason is still watching him, eyes narrow but attentive, face open and trusting in a way that makes Roy’s heart clench painfully.

“Be right back,” he promises, and ducks past the doorway.

There’s no real time for introspection or a much-needed self-directed pep talk, but Roy mutters half-hearted platitudes to himself even as he digs the big repurposed toolbox out from behind a half-empty bottle of Drano and a stack of toilet paper.

“C’mon, Harper, you got this. Just your ex-bestie riding back into your life on a forced high, you’ve seen weirder shit in the last month.”

He doesn’t think he sounds especially reassuring and when he catches sight of himself in the mirror over the sink he looks just like he feels - pale and wounded and angry, whole body coiled tight enough to snap. He doesn’t linger on it, though. He hardly thinks Jason is in any position to appreciate his fraught emotional state, and Roy doesn’t need to be happy or even calm to remember his way around rudimentary wound care.

When he drags the kit out into the living room Jason’s eyebrows twitch in surprise and Roy can’t help the commiserating smirk that flickers to life at the corner of his mouth.

“I know,” he agrees, falling back into the comforting patterns of familiar conversation even without whatever pithy one-liner Jason would usually offer when confronted with the beast of a medical supply kit. “Blame Lilith. She’s big on self-care, mental and physical.”

“C’n see that,” Jason offers, blinking politely while Roy snaps the latches on the front of the kit and starts digging out all the supplies he might need at a glance.

“We have mandatory refresher courses every other month,” he continues, setting a stack of iodine wipes and clean washcloths alongside a couple of rolls of gauze and an assortment of bandages. “And a standing order to take at least one mental health day after any engagement.”

“Bet’chu love that,” Jason snorts, and Roy lifts one shoulder in a shrug, strangely stung by the brush-off.

“It’s kept me alive so far,” he says blandly, and Jason goes quiet. They both know he doesn’t just mean the lessons in field dressing. When he glances up, Jason is watching him, eyes still heavy lidded but open, mouth turned slightly down in what, for Jason, counts as an expression of fairly obvious anguish. Roy sighs and scoots closer, beckoning Jason to lean forward as he instructs contritely, “C’mere Jaybird, and wipe that frown off your face. I need to clean your lip up.”

Jason is a good patient, by some definitions. He’s still and quiet and malleable in an utterly disconnected way that makes Roy uncomfortable if he thinks on it too long. He remembers setting fingers for Jason once and not getting so much as a wince at the miserable grind as he snapped them back into place. It’s disconcerting, to say the very least. Even moreso when Roy’s past and his present are overlapping one another like a double exposure, Jason’s stoic acceptance of pain stark and out of place in the cozy comfort of Roy’s Manhattan bachelor pad.

He makes quick work of it, insomuch as he can, unwilling to overlook potential injury just to soothe his own rapidly fraying nerves, especially with Jason too doped up to make note of issues he wouldn’t normally let slide. It’s mostly a lot of little scrapes and cuts - the split lip, busted knuckles, road rash on his shoulder from tucking and rolling without a shirt, bruising all over his ribs, some minor contusions that might be from his plummet onto Roy’s balcony.

“How’re your legs?” Roy asks as he lays a butterfly bandage across a nasty gash along the bridge of Jason’s nose. His voice is softer than he means it to be, but it still sounds loud in the intimate stillness of the apartment.

“Fine,” Jason says.

“Nothing I need to check out? No stab wounds or twisted ankles?”

Jason shakes his head, for a generous definition of the term, rocking it back and forth without lifting it up off the sofa cushion. It makes little tufts of his hair stand out at odd angles and Roy’s heart lurches uncomfortably in his chest at the sight.

“Alright then,” he says, pushing past the unwelcome feeling, tucking all of the unused medical supplies away and gathering the rest in a haphazard pile for later disposal before pushing himself to his feet. “Let’s get you into something comfier than some gunrunner’s stolen pants and put you to bed, Jaybird.”

“M’fine here,” Jason protests, waving a hand in a slow, lazy arc, dropping it down like it’s heavier than he expected it to be.

“Maybe so,” Roy agrees, “but I’m gonna need to use my living room sometime in the next sixteen hours, which’ll be tough if you’re out here getting your beauty sleep.”

It’s a weak joke, as they go, but Jason snorts gamely and accepts Roy’s proffered hand when he holds it out. It takes more effort than Roy would prefer to drag Jason onto his feet, but he can hardly blame the guy for not shaking off major tranquilizers with a flick of his wrist. Though, if anybody could, it would be Jason, who, between his own paranoia and the Bat’s unholy commitment to Boy Scout preparedness, has probably spent most of his life building up tolerances to all manner of substances. Roy considers this for a long moment, mentally revises the size of the dose he’s been estimating they gave Jason, and increases the projected recovery time accordingly.

He tugs Jason’s arm over his shoulders, fingers wrapped firmly around Jason’s wrist, and after a few false starts the two of them manage an awkward shuffling side-step all the way to Roy’s bedroom.

It’s nothing special, standard array of furniture with the exception of the bed itself, which is a California king. Roy’s one indulgence, considering his intimate partners, historically, err on the side of tall and athletic, and Roy isn’t exactly a small man, himself. Everything is fairly unkempt for the moment since Roy has been actually inhabiting his apartment for a few days, but it’s the standard clutter of a lived-in space - half-empty glasses of water collecting on the nightstand, dirty laundry tossed carelessly into the corner, linens kicked down to the foot of the bed. He debates changing them out, but only for the half second it takes Jason to shift his weight so that even more of it is hanging off of Roy.

Once he sets Jason down there’s no way Roy is getting him up again within at least eight hours, by a generous estimate. If it’s the difference between recuperating on Roy’s decadent mattress or cultivating a monstrous crick in his neck on the sofa, Jason can deal with gently used sheets.

He sighs and dumps Jason onto his bed with little ceremony, slinging the other man off of his shoulder like he would a particularly unwieldy duffel bag. Jason flops back into the mess of a duvet with zero resistance beyond a soft, “Oof,” and blinks once, slow, at the ceiling.

“Kick these off, wonderboy,” Roy instructs, leaning over Jason and curling his hand over Jason’s knee, shifting his leg back and forth and plucking at the strange, slick fabric of his pants. “I’m gonna rustle you up some jammies.”

He waits just long enough to see Jason start fumbling at the placket of his slacks with clumsy fingers before turning to dig through his dresser in search of a suitable sleeping garment.

Roy is generally of the “briefs-or-nothing” school of sartorial sleep stylings so traditional pajamas are going to be a nonstarter, but he has plenty of well-worn sweatpants and much-loved novelty sports tees that should do the trick. Relics of days at the ballpark with Ollie, bittersweet reminders of the brief upswing his wayward youth had taken before everything came crashing down around his ears.

He spends a little more time than he needs to unearthing a pair of sweats so soft they’re a heartbeat from disintegrating and a decades old playoff tee touting one of the Star City Rockets’ championship runs. Half to give himself a moment to breathe past the white noise in his brain, and half to afford Jason what little dignity there is in undressing without help. He turns once the shuffling and grunting have settled back down, drawing his shoulders in tight and bracing himself for the very naked vigilante sprawled unconcernedly across his mattress.

It turns out to be a good move. Something about seeing Jason draped loose and easy over Roy’s sloppy sheets hits him hard in the gut and sends his head spinning. He doesn’t stumble as he crosses the room, but it’s a near thing, and Roy flushes with the indignity of it all, dropping the stacked clothing in an unkind heap directly on Jason’s face.

Jason makes a little wounded, whimpering noise, stomach clenching with it, and Roy tears his gaze away, rolling his eyes.

“You’re on your own, bat-brat,” he says firmly. “I’m not playing dress up.” He takes quick stock of Jason’s legs, his strong calves and thick thighs, skating around the dark thatch of hair at his groin and turning his back once he’s satisfied that Jason’s assessment had been accurate and there are no wounds, major or minor, that require immediate attention. “Get comfy, grab some Z’s. I’ll bring you some water in a minute.”

He reaches down on instinct to squeeze Jason’s knee again, quick affectionate pressure, and Jason makes another small noise that hooks hard behind his ribs and makes his heart twinge. He’s just crossing over the threshold into the livingroom when a meek, “Roy?” halts him in his tracks.

He turns, just enough to take the sight of Jason in over his shoulder - he’s dropped the clothes off to the side and pushed himself up onto his elbows. His eyes are dark and heavy-lidded, inky hair a mussed halo, lips swollen and bitten pink. It’s an image that Roy has conjured any number of times - without the injuries, of course - though none so frequently as he had when it was just the two of them and their warehouse and the unshakable certainty that no matter how Roy’s life shifted or shattered, Jason would always be there. It seems almost cruel of the universe to confront Roy with it now, when he’s spent the better part of a year burying old hopes and trying desperately to reap new ones out of the same soil, but then, when has Roy ever found fate to be especially kind?

He swallows past the knot in his throat, croaks, “Yeah, Jay?”

Jason watches him for a long second, expression hazy and a little uncertain, then blinks one of those long, slow blinks and says solemnly, “Thank you.”

Roy may be an expert marksman, but he’s never known anyone who can fire a shot straight through the heart quite like Jason Todd.

He looses a little punched-out breath past his teeth, head dropping like his strings have been cut, snapping under all the weight in that black-blue gaze. He shakes his head, as if that might rattle some of the discomfort loose, smirk cutting sharp and jagged at the corner of his mouth. He can’t quite manage to look back at Jason when he speaks.

“Sure.”

Brisk and clipped short to keep the bitter edge from frothing up. He raps his knuckles once against the doorframe and goes, easing the door shut behind him with a gentleness he doesn’t feel.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roy scrubs at his face, sighing deeply and depositing his weight against the kitchen counter in something perilously closer to a collapse than a lean.
> 
> First things first, he needs to figure out who to call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wrote most of this before I was caught up on Titans and the painful but wonderful slow dissolution of Roy’s easy friendship with Dick. I’d been operating as if it were an AU anyway but this just a note to remind y’all that this is totally self-indulgent garbage that is now so divorced from canon I can’t even see it in the rearview mirror.
> 
> Also as previously stated, I have a vague idea of where I’m going with this - reconciliation, feelings, probably at least kissing - but I’m not plotting it out or anything so it might be a bit of a road to get there. I feel like it might also be prudent to note that I don’t particularly care for Damian and that probably comes through a little, so if that’s going to be an issue for you my angsty make-up fic may not be your best option.
> 
> Anyway, please enjoy another few thousand words of Roy’s tortured introspection with some bonus Good Guy Dick Grayson!

Roy comes to a sudden stop a few steps into the living room, body seizing like he hit a wall, and blinks blankly into the middle distance while the surreality of everything that’s happened in the last twenty minutes catches him full force. His knees wobble for a precarious moment under the weight of the sudden emotional upheaval, be he keeps his feet underneath him.

“Holy shit,” he breathes, and barks one laugh, then two, dissolving into a spate of desperate, half-hysterical giggles. He covers his face with a hand and bites his lip to try and keep from making too much noise. Not that his unexpected houseguest is any state to overhear and come investigate, but the moment feels brittle, fragile and on the cusp of shattering. “ _Holy shit._ ”

Half an hour ago he’d been aching for want of a drink and wallowing in painful memories of his past, of Jason in particular, and now, suddenly, here he is, in the flesh. Summoned from the depths of Roy’s subconscious and delivered on a platter, in admittedly poorer shape than Roy would have preferred if he’d had a choice.

It feels convenient. Too easy. Almost like magic.

Roy might suspect it for exactly that if he hadn’t spent the last few months mired in a magically induced parody of his own life. It’s easier to spot the difference when your every waking moment in recent memory has been dedicated to unraveling the particular kinds of uncanny impossibilities in which mystical manipulation tends to find a foothold.

Magic lacks human nuance, and there’s something primally upsetting about the way it bends the world to the whim of its affected subject. A sense of wrongness so pervasive as to saturate a man’s every thought, similar to the prickle creeping under the skin of a person who knows they’re being watched but can’t pinpoint from where. It’s a bastard cousin of the animal instinct that sends prey erupting from the grass in the same heartbeat that the wind shifts direction even if there’s no tooth or claw in sight - the bone-deep knowledge that something is off, that danger is there, even if it isn’t immediately obvious.

For all that Jason’s reappearance is a hell of a coincidence, it’s more than vaguely within the realm of possibility. They’re both fairly prominent figures in a distressingly small niche community, and Roy is close friends with several of Jason’s family members, to say nothing of the open-ended history they share between the two of them. They were bound to cross paths eventually, despite Roy’s myopic self-deception to the contrary.

The shock that has him reeling now that he and Jason are face-to-face again is offoolish and utterly human provenance. It’s the surprise of running into an old lover at a restaurant you both used to frequent, confident that time and distance have sufficiently softened the painful edges of the memories you made here to allow you to enjoy it, only to find yourself wholly unprepared to weather the presence of the actual flesh and blood person, laughing and smiling and demanding your attention in a game whose new rules you haven’t quite yet grasped.

“Yeah,” Roy mutters, bitter and admonishing, scrubbing his hand over his face and pushing himself into motion with a heavy step. _“Just like_ running into an old flame, Harper, you idiot.”

He takes a numb couple of steps toward the couch, gathering up the bloody detritus of his attempt at playing nursemaid. He’s not squeamish - no room to be when you’re throwing your own boring, human fat into the fire alongside people who run the gamut of indestructibility - but he wrinkles his nose at the astringent waft of disinfectants, damned tender heart of his twisting a little at the rust-hued Pollock of Jason’s blood saturating it all. He stares at it for a long, hard second.

_Where the hell was his team?_

The thought comes sudden and unbidden, ridden close at heel by a vicious wave of jealous certainty that he would have been there. Roy sighs and shakes his head, biting his lip.

Doesn’t matter. Not his business.

If the angriest Amazon on Earth and the albino space clone hadn’t seen fit to rescue Jason from whatever trouble he’d gotten into, that was their prerogative. He doubts Jason has the same relationship with this new crew that he’d had with Roy and Kory, all of them rushing off willy-nilly and half-cocked to scoop the others out of a jam they might not have wound up in in the first place if they’d taken a few moments longer to think. Toward the end, they’d all been too reliant on the quiet reassurance in the back of their heads that someone would show up to help in the eleventh hour. It hadn’t made them sloppy, exactly, but it had bloated their confidence and encouraged more carelessness than they ought have allowed.

That they had even managed to coax Jason back into a place where believed again in saviors at all had been a feat of some skill or talent that Roy had never determined how to measure. That Jason had never seemed to mind that the rescuers he’d learned to put his faith in were generally toting more hope and goodwill than additional firepower or functional exit strategies was yet another miracle Roy doesn’t think he’ll ever fully understand.

It makes his stomach clench to consider that Jason left that loyalty, that easy trust with Roy back in the warehouse and hasn’t picked it up again since, but he can’t say he’s especially surprised. This new gang is probably better off for it, if Roy is in the mood to be honest.

Somehow he doesn’t see either one of Jason’s most current counterparts pining hopelessly for months after the natural dissolution of their partnership points them in a different direction than Jason intends to travel. Not that Kory did, either, but even in the privacy of his own mind Roy isn’t quite up to shouldering the indignity of being the only person in the known universe who’d follow along like a lost puppy if Jason beckoned.

He’s probably also the only one who worries after Jason with quite this intensity. He knows it’s foolish - a reflection of his own neediness twisting itself into an ouroboros and convincing him that Jason is anchored to him in the same way.

It isn’t true, of course. If the wildly unexpected events of the morning have proven anything, it’s that Jason is hardly a damsel in distress.

Strip Roy naked and toss him into a fight and he’d probably wind up jailed by hostile foreign powers, again. Or strapped to a table by a teenage psychopath. Again.

Do likewise with Jason and he absconds with somebody’s pants and probably busts more than a few heads on his way out the door.

Roy can’t help but grin a little at that, because he’s always been weak for Jason’s vicious edge. He huffs a soft breath of laughter and balls the gauze and tape and iodine wipes up into a sloppy, well pummeled mass, hustling the whole lot to the trash can tucked neatly beneath his sink.

Space is something of a premium in New York apartments, Roy has learned. Half of his shit is hidden inside his other shit, it seems like, which is probably a metaphor that a shrink would have a field day with if he could be bothered to go find one. It’s all just as well, he supposes. At least he won’t have to stare at the grisly remnants while he figures out what his next steps ought to be.

If Jason had dropped - quite literally - back into Roy’s life a month ago, he would have spent the day kicking around his apartment, stewing in his frustration and nursing old hurts until Jason was cognizant enough to duke it out with him, probably literally. As it is, he has places he needs to be this afternoon, and he’s loathe to leave Jason alone for a number of reasons - not the least selfish of which is that he doesn’t trust Jason not to shake off those sedatives sooner than Roy thinks he will and skip town without a word.

Jason is something of a jabber-jaw by Bat standards, especially when he’s given a platform upon which to be a pithy little shit, but he prefers a captive audience. He tends to make unilateral decisions about intimate or emotional matters and then sets his stubborn, handsome jaw and rides those choices until they die underneath him.

Roy _knows_ that if Jason will cede the floor, he can make a damn good case to the contrary. Jason knows it too. That’s part of why Jason hadn’t given him time when they’d last spoken, he’s almost certain. Roy had been reeling already, from Duela, and the deaths of his homicidal ex-mercenary crew, and Jason had made his parting shot before Roy could gather his wits around him again and actually engage.

It was a mercy, really - the last thing Roy needed was to run himself headfirst into the immovable wall of Jason’s will on live television, freshly humiliated and beaten to shit besides, but if Jason disappears this time, if he slips through Roy’s fingers before Roy has the chance to pry a little good old fashioned emotional vulnerability out of him, Roy’s pretty sure his head will explode. He can’t take another gutting like that, not when his seams are barely holding together as it is.

Roy scrubs at his face, sighing deeply and depositing his weight against the kitchen counter in something perilously closer to a collapse than a lean.

First things first, he needs to figure out who to call.

Kory spends most of her time nowadays corralling that squad of super-brats, which doesn’t always allow for a sudden, unexpected change in plans. Besides, the only thing worse than Jason showing up battered and helpless - or as helpless as Jason ever gets, considering he appears to have escaped captivity while heavily sedated and mostly or entirely nude - would be Jason showing up battered and helpless and being subjected to Damian’s mercurial scale of assholery.

Roy frowns, nearly sneering at the thought. He doesn’t need to see Bat family drama unspool in his living room, today of all days, and he’s certain that with the way his luck has been leaning over the past few weeks he would wind up playing host to the littlest demon vigilante even if he asked Kory to be discreet. Maybe _especially_ if he asked Kory to be discreet.

It seems to be a trademark move of all Bats to suss out where they’re least wanted and beeline directly for it, which is useful for fighting crime but markedly less so for fostering healthy interpersonal relationships. If it were an ordinary Wednesday, Roy may not mind a bit of bloody entertainment, but Jason’s in no shape to throw down against the Boy Jackass, and Roy doesn’t expect he’ll fare very well if he tosses the gauntlet down in defense of Jason’s admittedly questionable honor. 

He might be a narcissistic little prick, but Damian has just as much expert training behind that infuriating smirk as anyone who came up under Batman. Roy learned that the hard way when they tangled in the gardens of stately Wayne Manor back before Roy’s entire life had fallen into the unsettling habit of dissolving around him over and over again, and that juvenile little scuffle had been a very nearly playful romp undertaken largely out of boredom. He suspects if he were to actually engage he wouldn’t come out nearly so well in the long run.

The only other real option is Dick. It’s risky, because things between the Bat brothers is constantly in flux, so Dick might be wringing his wrists waiting for a scheduled check in, or it might be as much of a surprise to him as it was to Roy that the biggest little bird is in town.

To that end, if Dick doesn’t already know that Jason is lurking around their neighborhood it’s probably because Jason explicitly kept the knowledge from him. Not necessarily for nefarious purposes - although with Jason there’s usually one or two of those loitering quietly in the wings, waiting for the opportune moment to make a show-stopping entrance to center stage - but because he and Dick tend to butt heads about their respective professional choices.

Of all his adopted siblings, that Jason tends to get on best with Tim is no secret. Once he’d gotten past the rage at his so-called “replacement,” bolstered by a dangerous cocktail of trauma and whatever madness might have leached in through the waters in the Lazarus Pit, it had been a surprising boon that they didn’t know each other before Jason’s short-lived stint below ground. Building anew can be a hell of a lot easier than fixing shoddy foundations.

It helps that Tim shares both Jason’s pragmatism and his ability to see Batman for who and what he is; to take the man without the shine of the myth distorting the view, but personalities aside Roy knows it’s the history that tangles Jay and Dickie up. The tense, adolescent years before Jason went toe-up, and the awful, violent months after he crawled out of a pine box and back into everybody’s lives with a chip on his shoulder and the firepower to make it mean something.

Roy remembers how badly it had chafed Dick to see someone else step into the uniform, despite having demanded his hard-won right to move on and explore what it meant to do good on his own terms, without the yoke of Batman hanging over him. He remembers the arm’s length distance Dick enforced between himself and Jason, the guilt that had nearly swallowed him whole when Jason died. Everything that’s happened since then has really only further knotted an already fraught and confusing relationship. 

Roy understands, he really does. Jason isn’t the easiest man to abide, with his callous cynicism and his interpretation of justice that lands so much closer to cruelty than most of the other Bats are willing to skirt, and for all his virtues, most days Dick can be so cowed by his efforts to embody Batman’s impossible ethics as to cut himself off at the knee in situations where honor might be better off abandoned. They’re each equally maddening in their own separate ways, but it’s easy to see how the rough edges of one are so perfectly suited to catch on the other.

Roy doesn’t think it’s a secret that if push comes to shove, the likelihood is that he’ll come down on Jason’s side. Dick has loved him through a lot, in spite of many transgressions and failures, but there’s a difference between loving someone despite their shortcomings and loving someone with their shortcomings all bundled into the sum of their parts. For a long time it had been he and Jason standing back to back against their demons in places Dick would never think to tread.

Besides, Roy has always been a bit of a sucker for taking stupid, dangerous risks - particularly when they come wrapped up in killer combat skills and a six-foot-spare frame.

Roy is loathe to potentially betray Jason’s trust - especially considering that Dick’s natural inclination toward nurturing will likely catapult him straight into Roy’s living room posthaste - but he doesn’t see a better viable option. Beyond Kory, whose easy amiability and bottomless affection make hours pass like seconds, there’s nobody Roy would trust aside from a Bat to keep Jason there until he gets back. Lacking any better options off of that limited roster, Roy would rather roll the dice on Dick than Damian.

Neither is it quite in alignment with Roy’s plan to spend what is essentially his weekend blessedly free of well-meaning mother hens, but needs must.

He crosses into the kitchen and picks his phone up from where he’d thrown it down onto the counter earlier, attention split between scrolling through to Dick’s number - logged under the name “Flips McGee” and a bird emoji - and keeping an ear out for any worrisome sounds or signs from Jason in the bedroom.

Thankfully, Dick answers on the second ring.

“Hiram Hammerfel’s Pizza Emporium, proudly serving the greater Manhattan area,” he says brightly, because Dick think he’s funny, and this is his personal cell phone rather than the Titans line, which archives everything as a matter of public record in certain circles. This way the call will be politely and unobtrusively monitored and then discreetly tucked away in Barbara’s labyrinth of servers. “Can we sauce you up a slice?”

Normally Roy would play along, a joyful participant in a phenomenally stupid game they’d concocted when they were younger men with fewer concerns, but today he doesn’t have the patience. Not when he feels like his entire world is a heartbeat away from imploding, held together with little stronger than spit and hope.

“Did you know your brother was in town?” he snaps, meaner than he intended. It occurs to him now that he’s not quite sure how he’ll feel about it if it turns out that Dick did know, and simply didn’t see fit to mention to Roy that the ex-partner he can’t quite get over was busting up crime in their burg. Things have been tense between them, lately, between Roy’s truly spectacular catapult off the wagon before Mr. Twister, and the trouble with Troia, and Dick’s uncharacteristic new affinity for playing things close to the vest.

Luckily, it looks like that mystery will remain unsolved, as there’s a beat of curious silence before Dick says, a little cautious but mostly resigned, “I presume you don’t mean Damian.”

Roy doesn’t bother rewarding that with an answer, and after a beat Dick sighs and asks, “Which one?”

Roy huffs an irritated breath and turns to lean his hip against the counter, squinting his eyes shut and pinching furiously at the bridge of his nose.

“The one who just catapulted onto my balcony at eleven in the morning in a drug-induced stupor wearing only a stranger’s pants,” he supplies in a clipped grumble. There’s another silent, thoughtful beat. 

“...Jason?”

“Jason,” Roy confirms darkly. Dick lets out a little rush of breath, the kind of honest surprise that Dick is too genuine to fake off the cuff, and Roy’s agitation is soothed somewhat.

It’s a small, petty vindication to know that despite their estrangement and the muddling influence of heavy psychotics, Jason’s first choice was not to turn to the man he calls his brother but to seek safety here, with Roy.

 _“Shit,”_ Dick says, with feeling. “Is he okay?”

“Mostly,” Roy assures. “Apparently some of Black Mask’s goons relocated to our neighborhood and got the drop on him sometime last night. He’s a little banged up and tanked on sedatives but he didn’t have a concussion, nothing seemed to be broken, and he made it here alright.”

“Dammit, Little Wing,” Dick mutters to himself, and Roy knows that tone intimately. He’s heard it come out of his own mouth often enough, that uncomfortable blend of conflicting emotions that seems so uniquely applicable to Jason - relief that he’s okay, frustration that he feels the need to venture quite so close to death all the time, despair at the certainty that someday sooner rather than later he’ll cross that line instead of just flirting with it and be lost to them. Again. More permanently.

Roy can’t help the little, bitter grin of commiseration that curls at the corner of his mouth as he agrees, “Yeah.”

“I’ll be there in ten.”

Dick doesn’t say goodbye before he hangs up, patience for proper phone etiquette lost as his brain flips to crisis mode, falling into the familiar brisk efficiency of communicating with other vigilantes under those parameters. Not that having Dick’s wayward younger brother passed out dead to the world in his bed is a crisis, exactly, Roy tries to convince himself with little success.

It’s not a hardship, to get to be the one who patches Jason up and sees him safely settled down to rest, but it sure as shit ain’t easy, either. It shouldn’t be a big deal. Wouldn’t be, probably, if they’d parted on better terms, or if Roy hadn’t had the few months he’s had, wasn’t teetering perilously closer to relapse with every added stressor. But they didn’t, and he had, and he is, and there’s nothing he can do about it now except swallow his pride, let Dick hover in true helicopter mom fashion without complaint, and wait until Jason is conscious enough to hold an actual conversation to maybe try and sort out this tangle of emotions Roy has been carrying around for a year and change.

Assuming, of course, that he can catch Jason before the realization that he’s waking up in Roy’s bed works its way past the haze of the drug comedown and he disappears across the continent again.

“Oh Jaybird,” he sighs, scrubbing a palm over his face and cupping his own chin in his hand for a few seconds, grip tight enough to sting. “What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

No answer is forthcoming, of course, so Roy busies himself with tidying up - giving the dishes collecting in the sink a cursory wash, replacing pens and notepads and various other knickknacks to their respective homes, quietly and efficiently erasing the evidence that a life routinely occurs within the confines of this space. Once all that is finished, he fills a cup with water from the tap and grabs a sealed bottle from the stash he keeps in a lower cabinet, carting both to his bedroom with a minor pit stop to pick up the first aid kit on the way.

He hesitates briefly on the threshold, taking a little breath and opening the door slowly, carefully.

Jason doesn’t move so much as a centimeter when Roy peers into the room, sprawled inelegantly across the mattress very nearly exactly where Roy left him. He’s scooted up so that he’s lying properly rather than half-sitting with his feet posted on the floor, although he didn’t quite straighten out enough, so one of his long legs is at an angle that leaves his foot half-dangling over the edge of the mattress. He’s still naked, which Roy accepts with a resigned sigh and a purposeful exertion of will to tamp down on the part of him that lets out a little anguished cry of desire at the sight.

He sets the kit on the floor just inside the doorway - no sense putting it up completely since he’ll likely need to change some dressings and dig out some painkillers in awhile - and positions both the cup and the water bottle on his nightstand. He doesn’t think that his relationship with Jason has degraded so far as to run the risk of Jason believing Roy would tamper with anything he might ingest, but paranoia runs fairly rampant in their line of work and Roy would hardly call Jason a paragon of stability. Hell, he’s no leader in that arena, himself, and besides, he’s catered to more foolish neuroses in his day.

After that he wastes a few seconds trying to tidy a little of the clutter in the room without making too much noise. He gathers up the laundry and tosses it into a hamper in the corner that’s still half-full of clean clothes, resigning himself to running the whole load again. He stacks the cluster of books on his dresser into a neat pile, collects his used drinkware and a couple of mock arrow prototypes. All the while he glances occasionally at Jason out of the corner of his eye, some of the tension in him spooling off with every slow rise and fall of Jason’s sparsely-haired chest, the steady, gently wheezing drone of Jason’s breath, gone deep and thick with sleep.

He doesn’t do anything foolish, like brush Jason’s hair back or cup a palm around his cheek - he prefers his digits intact and Jason needs his rest, so he won’t allow his desire for comfort to spur him into selfishness - but he pauses in the doorway and lets himself look for a long second. His eyes catch on the dark fan of Jason’s lashes against his cheeks, paler-than-usual skin smeared with bruises, the slack line of his mouth. It’s not the first time he’s seen Jason sleep like this, so far gone that he looks a little like a rag-doll, strangely intimate white sliver of teeth visible where his lips are parted, but it’s the first time Roy can recall that it’s made him more angry than relieved.

He can feel it, now that the white noise in his brain is starting to recede - cold-edged fury beating against the brittle blanket of brisk efficiency he’d wrapped himself in the moment he realized Jason needed his help. Jason is fine, for a given definition, and that leaves Roy free to teeter on the cusp of drowning in the sudden, frigid pit of his rage.

He sets his jaw, draws his shoulders up, and makes for the door with a heavier tread than is probably wise given he has a drug-addled Red Hood semi-comatose in his immediate vicinity, but Jason doesn’t stir. For the second time in twenty minutes, he finds himself standing in the middle of his living room, frozen with the messy jumble of thoughts in his head and at a loss as to what to do.

He doesn’t have to ruminate on it long - after a few aborted circuits around the living room and kitchen, looking for menial chores to busy his hands, there’s the quiet thud of knuckles against his front door in a familiar beat.

Roy heaves a breath, reels his anger in as best as he can - not well, as emotional fortitude has never been a particular strength, but it’ll have to do - and crosses the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> (Also if anyone wants to scream about RHatO #25/RHatO Annual #2 with me, I’m going to go ahead and cop to the fact that I’m on Tumblr again even though I’ve been nervous about doing so for personal reasons.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!!


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